/dev/chat - 2015-09-20

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12:10 AM

@cas yes, I remember you said you had health issues. I was afraid it might have been something like that. Good to have you back and I hope you're feeling better!

Oh, sorry @Gilles, I hadn't read the explanation.

@terdon thanks for the correction

3 hours later…

3:12 AM

@IncnisMrsi a latex file can have plenty of markup related to tables, figures, captions, references, citations, section headings, tikz, etc all in addition to math mode. Throw in that the bibliography isn't in the tex file but in an external BibTex file that isn't properly rendered except in the output dvi / pdf file and it is even more of a pain to go latex->anything else. If you have a complicated project split into multiple files (e.g. a file per chapter) and the pain gets worse

3:49 AM

@terdon: 4 operations over the last year or so, a week in ICU on life support, a couple of "holy ^@%@ i almost died!" experiences, and i'm now well enough to be active on the transplant waiting list. i'm glad i live in a country with a public health care system (i'd be dead over a decade ago, otherwise)

5 hours later…

8:44 AM

@casey yes LaTeX to anything isn't practical except for a native typesetting solution, like tex4ht. And even that doesn't work well most of the time.

@Brandin Actually, I disagree. I think that acronym is rude under most circumstances. Just because it is the Internet, there is no magical dispensation of the obligation to be civil to ones fellow human beings.

@casey Well, TeX to PDF works, because it is sort of "builtin". But that is about the limit on conversions. Unless one counts DVI, which isn't a format that exists independently of TeX, anyway.

@cas Sounds awful. Where do you live?

Of course not a "dispensation". I mean only the expectation is different here. Example is WTF. This is basically an Internet only term. In "real life" it probably will be seen as a rudely phrased question. It's not "dispensation" but on chat and Internet you're allowed to be more abrasive to get your point across. People that complain about this just don't "Get" it.

@Brandin I'm personally not a fan of abrasiveness, but YMMV.

I think that because you can't hear voice tone, facial expressions etc. it is more important to be polite on the Net, not less.

2

Of course, many people find it easier to be rude to a person they have never met and who is just lines on a screen that they would in real life. This is similar to the phenomenon of aggressive driving one comes across.

I'm aware I'm not saying anything original here...

@FaheemMitha: Aggressive driving leads to accidents and fatalities.

@IncnisMrsi That's true. It does.

8:59 AM

But who cares about some guy’s comfort and self-esteem when he is directed to learn textbooks?

Nobody cares about me, when my answers are mangled and comments deleted.

Why should Ī̲ care about anybody here?

Drive-by flagging answers without reading discussions…

… is much closer analogy to aggressive driving than when Incnis Mrsi tells someone his question is awful and he should read a textbook.

@IncnisMrsi Caring about other people is always a good thing.

How is UL (and StackExchange in general) useful for me? Everywhere the same picture: a handful of experts (some active, like Gilles here, some only sometimes showing up to boost the site’s prestige, as in Physics.SE where two world-class scientists are enlisted),

but otherwise StackExchange is populated by people with about the same level of knowledge as myself.

@IncnisMrsi I wasn't talking about usefulness. I was just talking about courtesy.

Usefulness is a separate topic.

And doesn't have anything to do with what I was talking about here...

And I was just responding to @Brandin's comment, anyway.

Brandin’s point is extremism.

What a fool idea: StackExchange’s anonymous ▾ are polite, but directing to read ESR is impolite?

This system has advantages over Wikimedia, but it’s inherently dishonest. Who should care about some superficial stuff then?

9:44 AM

It’s generally a bad idea: project real-life models (such as motorized traffic rules) to “ethicospheres”.

Unfortunately Stanisław Lem’s novel that defines “ethicosphere” isn’t available in English. It’s an artificial environment that prohibits doing harm.

MediaWiki implemented this concept fairly well ☺ but the back side is extinguishing human responsibility.

That’s less a problem on StackExchange than in Wikimedia projects, but StackExchange will eventually comes to the same where Wikimedia is now – the rule of incompetence.

Both are systems that do their best to “protect” a user from doing “incorrect” things.

Slightly more emphasis on education of users is made on StackExchange than in Wikimedia projects, but anyway, if a user is protected from seeing a comment that his/her question is crap, then the ultimate fate is determined.

10:13 AM

StackExchange has some usefulness for me because there are elite sites. One of them is MathOverflow where Ī̲ managed to produce as few as one upvoted answer, by now. And where a deeply specialized question has fair chances to be addressed by clever people.

I.e. there are sites where the general populace (not only some top experts) is much more knowledgeable than me, at least in their respective domains.

Dunno whether another bright example exist. “Theoretical Computer Science” appears to have a population of experts, but overall level is very short of MathOverflow.

I have found SE quite useful, personally. Though everyone's experience is different, depending on their needs/requirements, experience etc.

The TeX site is a particular standout. It's made quite a difference to my experience of TeX/LaTeX.

Partly because of the instrinsic difficulties of typography, and partly because of its insane design, one needs more hands on assistance with TeX than with most programming things.

Though of course SO is useful too.

10:29 AM

@cas Shit, that sounds awful. Kidneys, right? I hope it's your turn soon.

Hi @terdon. Having a good weekend?

@FaheemMitha Hey, so far, so good :)

Cool.

@FaheemMitha “insane design [of TeX]”, seriously? This software is older that median age of SE users, and there was no major overhaul of the TeX proper, only libraries are evolving.

The only serious flaw in Knuth’s original TeX was poor i18n. By now, it seems to be fixed, although Ī̲ don’t know details.

@IncnisMrsi Yes, seriously. The experts politely describe Knuth's code as "eccentric". I'm personally inclined to be less charitable. I still use it. I have no choice. It has no competition in its space.

I don't dislike it, but I certainly have mixed feelings about it, as many do.

I'm very happy with how the results look. But it's not a user friendly programming environment, that's for sure.

10:43 AM

Yes, it’s not very friendly and programming in TeX absolutely isn’t foolproof.

Syntax of TeX as a programming language is awkward. But the TeX, its interpreter, is excellent.

Writing functions in TeX requires an advanced level of algorithmic thinking.

A thing converse to (an ethicosphere, a consistent programming paradigm).

Without understanding how does the substitution occur one can’t write anything clever in TeX.

11:09 AM

Hi does anybody have any experience with the error "Invalid partition table" error? I tried to set up dual boot by installing kali in addition to my mint. I wanted to keep mint's grub2, so I installed kali's grub2 to an usb drive to get rid of it.. now I'm getting the "Invalid partition table" error. Any quick and easy fixes or does it seem to be a more complicated issue?

Is it possible that my computer deleted the mint's grub from my HDD's MBR, when I installed kali's grub to USB's MBR?

11:54 AM

@terdon: yep, that's right. and it's more a matter of best match (tissue, blood type etc btwn donor and recip) than whose turn is next. waiting time is...however long it takes. avg is about 4 years.

@FaheemMitha: wouldn't recommend it to anyone for a fun pastime :). I live in Melbourne, Australia.

12:25 PM

@Shepherd You probably screwed your MBR up, but it is fixable. Read manuals about installing a boot loader anew.

Also, transition from BIOS to UEFI added complications of which Ī̲’m no expert.

Ī̲ suppose thoughtless manipulations with boot priority took place, but it’s only a guess.

@cas Here's hoping its sooner than that, then.

@Shepherd Is this UEFI or BIOS? My guess is you just need to reinstall grub. See here for details:

8

A: How can I fix/install/reinstall grub?

So, it sounds like you have not installed a boot loader (e.g. grub) on the disk. This means that although you have a valid OS on it, there is no way to boot it and so you can't use it. You need to attach the HDD to a working computer (you can use a live CD), set up a chroot environment and insta...

2 hours later…

2:32 PM

@cas Would not recommend what? Sorry, forgot the context.

1 hour later…

3:49 PM

any apt experts around?

@Seth Define apt expert.

@FaheemMitha I'm just trying to figure out, if there are two sources for a package and both have the same priority in apt, which will it choose? In this case it's a package in the ubuntu repos and a package in a PPA.

@Seth Probably the more recent one. But source handling used to be broken until fairly recently. Why not just try? You can specify the source version if you want.

Are you doing apt-get source or something else?

@FaheemMitha apt-get install.

Both packages are the same version, so neither is more "recent" (hence the question).

@Seth Oh, then I misunderstood what you meant.

@Seth Exactly the same?

I think then probably the source that appears first in the sources.list. But I'm not sure.

Can you post apt-cache policy for the package?

4:05 PM

unity-tweak-tool:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 0.0.6ubuntu2
  Version table:
     0.0.6ubuntu2 0
        500 us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu vivid/universe amd64 Packages
     0.0.6ubuntu2 0
        500 ppa.launchpad.net/sethj/testing/ubuntu vivid/main amd64 Packages

that's what I was looking at.. Please don't ask why I'm asking >.>

You don't want to know..

Oh, then they really are the exact same version. Huh. I think it might be possible to further subselect using the source repos.

But I don't think I have ever done that. It never came up.

So, what is your question exactly? You want to know how to select one of these two?

You really should tell the person who created the PPA to add something to the version string to differentiate it from the official one.

That's standard practice.

@FaheemMitha I just want to know which one apt will select if I call install on it. I'm assuming the first one?

@Seth I'm not sure. As I said earlier, I think the first one apt sees in the sources.list. But I could be wrong.

I don't know what procedure apt uses for breaking a tie. It comes up so rarely.

@FaheemMitha ah, ok.

@Seth You could hop on #debian-apt on OFTC and ask the real experts.

4:12 PM

> Several instances of the same version of a package may be available
when the sources.list(5) file contains references to more than one
source. In this case apt-get downloads the instance listed earliest in
the sources.list(5) file. The APT preferences do not affect the choice
of instance, only the choice of version.

from man apt_preferences

If you want to force a different source, I think apt-get install foo/release will do it, if the repositories have different release attributes

@Gilles @FaheemMitha Thanks! That's what I needed to know.

4:27 PM

Having exactly the same version in different places is a bad thing, and should be avoided.

Assuming, of course, that there are differences between them. And if they aren't then why are they in different places?

2 hours later…

6:52 PM

This isn't about Unix, but what's the recommended way of adding stuff to a PDF on Windows? Like, if you want to comment on it? (Please don't hurt me. I don't use MS myself.) I think Adobe Acrobat would work, but would a free version, or does it need to be paid for?

@FaheemMitha Adding a new page to PDF is perhaps not difficult.

@IncnisMrsi I don't want to add a new page. Actually, the question is not for me, anyway. Perhaps I wasn't clear. How could one type on top of an existing PDF in Windows?

This is very difficult on free systems. In fact there does not seem to be a good answer. But on Windows one can use Adobe's own software.

I think I asked this before here, actually.

5

Q: Text annotations and image additions to PDF file using free software

I'm mostly interested in annotating a PDF file with text at a predetermined position. GUIs and command line utilities are both Ok, but only free software solutions, please. However, I included image additions for completeness. There are two similar questions on Ask Ubuntu, but they are both a co...

pdf free-software

Hmm, supposedly Okular can do it. Let's try that again.

@FaheemMitha: There is a special Q&A for free software.

Here, at StackExchange.

7:30 PM

Hmm, the Okular annotation does not show up with xpdf or acroread. (I used review for that, but I don't see any other option.) So that makes it rather useless.

Wonderful, now I have to figure out where the Okular annotations are stored to delete them.

@FaheemMitha if annotations won't work for you (I do them in preview (OS X) on the rare occasion that I need them) you could always write up your comments into a pdf and pdfjointhe documents together

7:56 PM

@casey True, but it seems better to have it on the document itself.

does evince handle annotations? I haven't tried but I could check later today

@casey Possibly, but I really want something that will become part of the PDF itself. Is embedded the right word?

The okular annotations are stored in a separate xml file. This question helpfully told me where they were.

6

Q: Storing Okular PDF annotations and metadata in the PDF itself

The PDF viewer Okular (part of KDE desktop) has lots of nice features and supports lots of file formats. One of the things I like about it is the comments and annotations. Unfortunately, all of the comments and metadata (like last viewed page) get stored locally in: ~/.kde/share/apps/okular/docda...

Here's

5

A: Are there any full featured pdf readers that integrate comment function?

Since Version 0.17, Okular supports annotations saved to the PDF file. For this to work, you need to have a Okular compiled against a recent version of libpoppler (0.20+, this should be the case in any up to date linux distribution), and you need to use the "Save as..." command - otherwise the an...

which suggests that okular has proper annotation support. Let me try it.

0.14 is ancient

apt-cache policy okular
okular:
Installed: 4:4.14.2-2
Candidate: 4:4.14.2-2
Version table:
4:15.08.1-1 0
50 http://httpredir.debian.org/debian/ unstable/main amd64 Packages
*** 4:4.14.2-2 0
500 http://httpredir.debian.org/debian/ jessie/main amd64 Packages
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
4:4.8.4-3+b1 0
500 http://httpredir.debian.org/debian/ wheezy/main amd64 Packages

So, where is 0.17?

ahh, 4.14 is the KDE version most likely

ocular current is version 0.23

so that'll probably install whatever version was current when KDE 4.14.2 was released

8:06 PM

That's like super confusing.

Ok, the default reports Version 0.20.2.

okular --version
Qt: 4.8.6
KDE Development Platform: 4.14.2
Okular: 0.20.2

8:18 PM

Hmm. I added some stuff as suggested. xpdf can see it, and evince (though it throws a complaint) but acroread doesn't.

Of course acroread on Linux is getting a bit ancient, but I assumed it would read annotations.

does the chrome pdf viewer see annotations?

seems not but there are chrome extensions that claim to implement annotations

8:38 PM

@casey Haven't tried it. One sec.

@casey No, it doesn't work here.

gtklp prints the annotation.

This is chromium --version
Chromium 45.0.2454.85 Built on 8.1, running on Debian 8.2

2 hours later…

10:29 PM

@casey Added an answer for okular.

0

A: Text annotations and image additions to PDF file using free software

Okular can make annotations on PDFs, as of the version in Debian 8 (Jessie). This is the version: okular --version Qt: 4.8.6 KDE Development Platform: 4.14.2 Okular: 0.20.2 Here is how it works: For details, see the Annotation reference page from the Okular manual. First, you need to annotat...

10:40 PM

@casey evince supposedly also works, but I haven't figured it out yet. The evince menu doesn't offer any clues.

11:01 PM

I messed around with evince annotations. Support for annotations is much more primitive, and probably not worth bothering with. In any case, okular is currently my default PDF viewer, since evince did horrible things to their menu (like mostly destroying it). Got to wonder with GNOME's problem is.

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